One of the quirks of Fine Gael is that many members of the party – including our incoming Taoiseach – have their own special pronunciation of their party’s name, one that is rarely, if ever used by the public at large: Finneh G’wael.
It’s an odd tic, because it’s not used in any other context. Simon Harris does not go around referring to G’waelic Football or G’waelic culture and traditions, nor does anybody else. Nor is it a pronunciation of the party name that one commonly hears elsewhere from its opponents or even from non-members. It has the feel, therefore, of a kind of linguistic version of the freemason’s secret handshake: A way for two Blueshirts to recognise each other’s special cultural and linguistic kinship.
I mention this because, perhaps more than any other political party in the state, Fine Gael holds dear to a kind of internal self-mythology about itself. At once old guard constitutionalists – the party that founded the state and carries the torch of Michael Collins – and forward-thinking reformist liberals, with original copies of The Just Society treated as gold dust amongst the faithful. Speak to two Fine Gaelers and you’ll get three versions of what the party stands for, but none of them will be in any doubt that it stands for something unique and special. You’ll also be left with an abiding sense that Fine Gael is, in the eyes of the true believers at least, just something of a cut above, culturally and socially.
I write those two paragraphs not to mock the party, but to identify something of a problem for it: It is a party entirely united in its sense of its own historic and contemporary importance to Ireland and Irish society, but entirely disunited when it comes to agreeing on what role it should play. Last week, for example, Michael Ring greeted the election of a new party leader with the warning that Fine Gael had been “too left for too long”.
Then by contrast, at the weekend the Simon Harris show was apparently consciously and hilariously upstaged – to the outrage of many members – by the re-emergence of former TD Kate O’Connell (managing to secure almost as many column inches as Harris himself) who seemed to believe that the new leader would usher in a new beginning for feminist-centric progressivism.
She even posed beside the new leader, one arm around him and one arm raised in the air, fist clenched in triumph, with his face a rictus grin of endurance. It is not much of a simplification to say that here, then, is Simon Harris’s big question: Is he more aligned with Michael Ring, or Kate O’Connell?
This problem – that the party has a great sense of its own importance but no fixed view on why it is important, exactly – is probably the single biggest one to confront Simon Harris, politically. Presumably that’s why he chose entirely to avoid it in his first speech as leader.
We got some fairly bland statements, to be sure: We got a list of Fine Gael’s fundamental values, the first of which was, I kid you not, “hope”.
The third was “integrity”. One wonders what other party in the state would baulk at including these amongst its “fundamental values”.
The other two were slightly more substantial but not exactly defined: “Equality of opportunity” and “security”. That was as ideological as it got: Fine Gael’s values are buzzwords. The words “Fine Gael believes” did not appear once in the speech – an absence both instructive and obvious, when you consider the problem that the party isn’t really sure what it believes.
What we got instead was the usual Ard Fheis laundry list from a party in Government: A shout out to the pensioners here, some conservative promises on housing there, and most of all a focus on the relatability of the leader: Simon Harris as proud son, doting husband, and loving brother, whose primary qualification is the fact that he understands what it is like to be a young person seeking to buy a home and start a family, or understands what it means to have a family member in need of services and support.
The problem with this is that it all feels a little bit 2010.
Opposition parties can get away with believing in not much, and basing their campaigns largely on biography. When you’ve not been in power for more than a decade, biography can be used to reinforce the narrative of change: Unlike the Government our new young leader is a real person who has lived the problems in the country and understands them, and has the energy to deliver change. Tony Blair and David Cameron, in the UK, have performed that play in living memory. Barack Obama did it in the US in 2008. Simon Harris, it appears, is going to try it from the ranks of a Government that’s been in office for more than a decade.
The other person trying this, at present, is Rishi Sunak. It is not exactly working.
The basic problem for Fine Gael is that voters do not look to political parties that have been in office for ten years to deliver change. Unless, that is, there can be a real feeling that something dramatically has changed. Boris Johnson, for example, delivered that feeling in 2020, when his leadership was a clear break in tone and priority from his two predecessors, and his resulting electoral coalition much different. Yet, to accomplish that, Johnson had to dramatically set a new tone and a new course for his Government.
Fine Gael under Harris does not appear to be considering any such thing. Instead, it appears to be banking on two things: Internally, the Fine Gwael approach: boosting morale by firing up the troops with a renewed sense that the party itself is special, even if nobody can precisely agree why. Externally, by focusing on biography and personality: A mean person – or indeed a nice person looking for a headline – might call this the Eoin McLove approach to marketing the leader as the sort of chap who bakes cakes for Granny and helps you across the road. In this strategy, the leader furrows his brow and does the I-feel-your-pain-and-will-help schtick a lot, when it’s conveniently too close to an election to deliver anything, while appearing on TikTok and Instagram to talk endlessly about how much he loves jumpers and puppies. Graham Linehan literally wrote this script, though I am not sure he intended it to be followed.
Meanwhile, the hope seems to be that the imperative of facing the electorate within twelve months will keep the Michael Ring/Kate O’Connell divide (for want of a better name) under wraps. One might say this is all the best Harris can do, under the circumstances.
The problem is, it’s not. If he wants to represent change, he must first deliver it. Both in tone, and in substance. There’s no sign of that to date.